Mid-City Neighborhood Organization

These following notes were compiled by Bob Rivard at the Board Meeting of N.O. Community Support Foundation (Friday July 21st 2006)

Background:

NOCSF is a foundation established by Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF) which has spearheaded the organization & development of the neighborhood planning process to be funded largely by the GNOF & the Rockefeller Foundation. The plans growing out of this process will ultimately be presented to the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) and passed on for approval & funding by state & federal legislatures.

The meeting (began at 8:00 am):

Board Members Present: Gary Solomon, Joseph Williams, Wayne Lee (Chair), David Voelker, Kim Boyle, and the Board Attorney, David Conroy

1st item after the welcome was approval of minutes of the last board meeting (formal reading waived).

2nd Item, Steven Bingler, founder of Concordia Associates presented a history of this process to date and then presented the recommendations as to planners to be contracted. One planning team is to be hired to develop a city wide rebuilding & recovery plan and an indeterminate number is to be hired to provide neighborhood planning services. [Aside by Rivard: The RFQ’s for both types of planning teams are available at the GNOF homepage as of 7/21/06 if you want to see what the positions entail. Unless indicated otherwise, what follows as “A” and “B” are summaries of Bingler’s remarks based on my notes and recollection. I apologize and defer to him he if he reports that he said something different. Bracketed comments are mine- Bob R.]

A. History–

On June 5, 2006 the Board issued Request for Qualifications (RFQ’s) for Neighborhood Planning Teams & Citywide Planning Teams. Purpose was to develop a pool of planners who would be available to each neighborhood to provide data and to ensure that plans submitted would meet guidelines set by law and City Planning Commission guidelines. The idea was that through this process NOCSF would “qualify” planners and that the neighborhoods would then select the qualified planners they wished to work with.

Goals of “unified” plan:

• Provide support for neighborhood planning teams;
• Avoid duplication of data and duplication of getting FEMA approvals
• Centralize the planning teams while maintaining a grass-roots process;
• Allow neighborhood groups to design neighborhood-oriented projects (i.e., schools, health care centers, community centers, etc.) while allowing city-wide planning of items which are in large part of “city wide” concern (roads, transportation, infrastructure, etc.)

The selectors who reviewed the RFQs and are now making the recommendations to Concordia & ultimately NOCSF are [my apologies for misspellings]:

• Ken Topping, former planning director of City of LA & experienced as a “disaster” planner;
• Bob Lurkot, former city planner of Pittsburgh PA & experienced in developing a commujnity planning structure;
• Gus Newport - someone who has been “in the trenches” doing neighborhood planning and critical to the “Dudley Street Initiative”;
• Yolanda Rodriguez, ex director of New Orleans Planning Commission.

Sixty-five submissions were made to the two RFQs. These were reviewed over a 3 week period by the above people and narrowed down to 22. Five of the 22 were applicants for the city wide position and 17 were applying for the neighborhood positions. These were interviewed from Monday, 7/17 through Thursday, 7/20.

B. Recommendations to the Board:

One City wide planner was unanimously recommended and now presented to the NOCSF Board for approval [I hope that the spelling is correct & that the links are to the correct firms, as these were quickly researched by me after the meeting]:

A collaborative venture between Villavosa & Associates and Henry Consulting, LLC, both of New Orleans.

Two alternative teams were also found acceptable, but with the Villavosa-Henry collaborative venture being the overwhelming recommendations of the selectors.

Five of the applicants for the neighborhood planners were reported to have “exceptional qualifications”:

• H3 Studio Inc., a design and planning firm in St. Louis founded by John Hoal, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis
• Goody Clancy of Boston
• ACORN of New Orleans
• Fred Schwartz of New York City
• EDSA, which Bingler said was from Columbia, MD, but which also appears to be from Fort Lauderdale

Another 10 firms, many local, were also recommended to the board:

• E. Eean McNaughton Architects
• Burk-Kleinpeter, Inc.
• Williams Architects
• HOK of St. Louis
• Andrés Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company from Miami
• Eskew Dumez Ripple
• Davis Brody Bond Architects & Planners of New York
• Torre Design Consortium Ltd.
• EDAW, with offices world-wide
• KL&M / CH Planning of New Orleans and Philadelphia

Before the Board voted on the recommendations, Concordia made 2 additional comments:

1. That the displaced “diaspora” needs to be included in this process, with every possible effort being made and funded to communicate with them;
2. Planning teams need to be sure that data initiates at the neighborhood level, but is coordinated city-wide.

The 16 above firms were then recommended to the NOCSF Board and unanimously approved by it.

Bobbie Hill, Director of planning for Concordia then spoke to outline the next steps and to briefly explain various participants role in the process. Most important she indicated that a web site, which is on-line but not yet fully operational, has been established for communications between neighborhoods, NOCSF, planners etc. This site is www.unifiedneworleansplan.org and should have much more information on it by Monday, July 24.

Ms. Hill indicated that on Sunday, 7/30/06, in the evening, there would be a meeting open to everyone to participate in which would address principally:

1. Participants could develop the criteria to define what would be a meaningful process;
2. Participants would address how neighborhoods and the qualified planners would work together;
3. At what level the interaction between planners and neighborhood groups would take place.

She also indicated that a review of the boundaries of the “neighborhoods” would occur. The 73 defined neighborhoods are based on the 13 City planning districts, which are then sub-divided into a total of 73 neighborhoods for city planning purposes. These neighborhoods were defined in the 80’s and may need some modification. As an example she cited Algiers, which encompasses 2 planning districts, Algiers and New Aurora/English Turn, as an area where residents have expressed a desire to work together as a single planning district. Ms. Hill indicated that there may be flexibility in the use of current boundaries for the organization of the present planning process.

A second open meeting will be held on Tuesday, August 1st. The preliminary time for this meeting is 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm. The location of this meeting and the meeting of July 30 are yet to be announced (watch www.unifiedneworleansplan.org for details of both meetings). On Tuesday, the first 2 hours will be an opportunity for participants to meet with representatives of the 15 neighborhood planning teams. During the remainder each of the teams will make a presentation, subsequent to which (I’m not sure if this will occur at the same meeting or not) each neighborhood group will make known their 3 top planning team choices. It is my understanding that each neighborhood group will be able to work with all 3 of the planning teams ultimately assigned to it by NOCSF, after NOCSF has reviewed the request of the neighborhood groups and worked out the scope of the contracts with the planning teams.

The next order of business was to approve the contract between Concordia, LLC and NOCSF. This is for the organizing work already done by Concordia and for continuing to facilitate the process. A question was asked from the audience about the role of Concordia and it was explained that they were, in effect, working as NOCSF’s staff to implement this process and coordinate and manage it. NOCSF has no staff to do this, so Concordia has been hired to fill the gap. Concordia’s contract was approved, with a couple of contract issues involving termination and payment of contingency still to be resolved.

The contract for the website consultant for developing www.unifiedneworleansplan.org was then approved.

The two most notable questions from the floor were:

1. With all of the neighborhood planning process that have been initiated and incomplete, is this a futile effort or will there be meaningful results. Steven Bingler indicated that the answer depended in large part on the commitment of the people in the room and in the neighborhoods, and expressed optimism. NOCSF Board member David Voelker indicated that he believed this would be successful because “there’s about 7 billion dollars to execute this plan”. Board chair Wayne Lee emphasized the importance of a unified plan which would go forward and be presented to the planning commission which would conduct further public hearings on it, and then pass on to city council who would have hearings and then to the mayor. From there it would proceed to LRA, then to the finance committee of the state legislature, then to the full house, then on to HUD. Conditioned on approval through each step, and the end of the day it would be difficult to oppose. On the other hand, because of all the steps, it was going to require sustained political support from the grass roots to keep it from being significantly modified at each step.
2. A second question from the audience inquired as to the efficacy of the times and dates for the two meetings presently scheduled. The response from the board and Concordia was that, while efforts have been and will be made to accommodate as many participants as possible, we also have to move this process forward as it has been languishing too long.

The meeting was adjourned at about 9:00 a.m.

If you have any questions about what took place and which aren’t answered by refering to some of the websites provided, feel free to leave a question in the comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Meetings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.